How to Resolve and Fix Microsoft Data Migration Assistant (DMA) Crash

This article will explain how to fix Microsoft Data Migration Assistance in case it crashes during the assessment or migration phase.

What is Microsoft Data Migration Assistant?

The Data Migration Assistant (DMA) helps you elevate to a modern data platform by catching compatibility issues that can impact database functionality in your new version of SQL Server or Azure SQL (DB) Database.

DMA guides performance and reliability improvements for your target environment and permits you to move your schema, data, and uncontained objects from your source server to your target server.

How to Resolve and Fix Microsoft Data Migration Assistant (DMA)?

The tool is robust and works well with smaller databases. But, how small is small? The official Microsoft documentation does not have a hard number. However, based on our experience, we reckon it should not be more than 200 GBs. Experiences may vary based on scenarios.

While using the tool, we learned several techniques to get around the crashing problems. We hope to get a permanent fix from Microsoft since it is an excellent tool for migration scenarios.

For migrating a large number of databases and bigger DB sizes, use the Azure Database Migration Service.
For migrations to Azure SQL Managed Instance, use the Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio since the DMA does not support it.
Run the DMA tool in single-user mode as shown below:

Open Task Manager>Details>WMA.exe. See screenshot below:

Select only 1 CPU and run your project assessment to check if it resolved the problem.

WorkflowHostProgram.Win has stopped working, as see in the following screenshot:

The WorkflowHostProgram.Win is the parent process of WMA.exe, and when it crashes, it shows up as “Not Responding” or “Close the Program”

Apart from running the program in single-user mode, check if your memory or CPU utilization is high.

Conclusion

We hope this post was helpful. We will update this post once we have more steps or options to troubleshoot. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome in the comment box below. Thanks for visiting.

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